William Raban

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Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov’s seminal film offers a new pathway for cinema away from narrative and represents an archetype for both documentary and experimental filmmaking.

A Diary for Timothy

I might have chosen Spare Time or any of the war time documentaries, but Humphrey Jennings’s Diary for Timothy is a powerful film in the form of a father’s letter to his new-born son to make an outstanding anti-war film.

Horror Film 1

With characteristic elegance, Malcolm Le Grice uses projected light, raw sound and the embodied shadow performance by the filmmaker to add new dimensions to the horror film genre within the context of expanded cinema.

Hand Grenade

Projected as either a single screen or 3-screen film, Gill Eatherley’s film celebrates vivid colour and hand-drawn light.

A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick raises questions about the failure of the penal system that are as relevant now as they were 50 years ago. The film seems timeless and though attacked at the time for its brutal misogyny, the Ludovico Treatment scenes provide a reflexive counter to those accusations.

Mirror

When I saw the film at its UK premiere at the Plaza Cinema in Camden Town it made little sense to me, but on repeated viewings it reveals its extraordinary depths and is one of Tarkovsky’s finest films.

SKAZKA SKAZOK

Yuri Norstein crafts this brilliant animation that is a profoundly affective anti-war film.

Gently Down the Stream

Using crudely shot black and white 16mm film with hand-scratched words into the emulsion, Su Friedrich creates this powerful cine-poem with great economy of means.

the names have changed, including my own and the truths have been altered

Onyeka Igwe investigates the British colonial archive to produce an astounding body of films, of which this is my favourite.

Citadel

John Smith’s trademark subtle wit brilliantly exposes Boris Johnson’s ludicrous response to the Covid pandemic set amongst the glittering towers surrounding Canary Wharf.